Saturday, October 27, 2012

Chris Stevens’ Last Words

Obama administration emails leaked to news organizations about last month’s terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, paint a shocking picture of the administration’s incompetence and callousness.

During the military-style assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, four American officials died, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. On the day of the attack, a few hours before he was raped and murdered by adherents of the so-called religion of peace, Stevens wrote in an email that a local Libyan commander in Benghazi “expressed growing frustration with police and security forces (who were too weak to keep the country secure) …”

It was a sad, prescient understatement.

For two weeks after the attack the Obama administration said over and over and over again that the incident in Benghazi was inspired by a low-quality anti-Islam video on YouTube. Eventually the administration acknowledged it was a terrorist attack.

But those who have been following the disturbing developments in Libya with an open mind know the Obama administration has been lying about what happened there from the start.

The most charitable conclusion one can draw is that during the attack the Obama White House froze under pressure, unable or unwilling to act, as the president geared up for a fundraising event in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada.

The less charitable, but more likely conclusion, is that the White House made a conscious, calculated decision to let American officials perish overseas, fully expecting the incurious pro-Obama media to ignore what really happened.

We now know that U.S. officials monitored an audio feed of the Benghazi attack in real time, as CBS News reported. During the attack, U.S. forces were in place in nearby Sicily, an hour or so away, but the order to fly to Benghazi in an attempt to rescue the besieged staff at the consulate never came.

That order was never issued by President Obama, probably because he knew it would reveal his policy of appeasement towards Islamic totalitarians to be in shambles as the Middle East and North Africa fell into the hands of America’s enemies.

Former CIA officer Clare M. Lopez, now a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, said Stevens knew al-Qaeda was targeting him but he lacked adequate security.

The Benghazi saga is a massive scandal, Lopez told Glenn Beck. “It’s huge, first of all, because we’ve got four dead Americans,” she said. “That’s the worst part of it all and nobody went to their assistance.”

Intelligence chief James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and David Petraeus all know what really happened in Benghazi, Lopez opined.

“This has to be brought out. This has to be made known to the public. That this is going on and that our administration was not only working with the bad guys, was working with al-Qaeda linked militias and jihadis to overthrow [President Bashar Hafez] Assad in Syria, but that they let our mission go down. They let our ambassador and others die. In real time, watching it happen, and they didn’t do anything about it,” Lopez said.

“In addition to Valerie Jarrett, the CIA got cables, the Department of Defense got cables, the NSA got cables during the attack on Benghazi, in addition to the emails that have since been made public. We know that there are cables that we haven’t seen yet confirming the State Department cable that this was an al-Qaeda linked attack.”

Klein said Clinton has documentary evidence that she previously asked for more security in Benghazi but that she won’t release it because it would torpedo Obama’s reelection bid and infuriate Democrats she might want to call upon should she run for president herself in 2016.

The late ambassador was painfully aware that Benghazi had been on the verge of exploding for some time. In a diplomatic cable in June, Stevens noted that “Islamic extremism” was on the rise and that “the Al-Qaeda flag” was flying over buildings outside Benghazi.

As the Washington Times reports, Stevens also wrote that attacks in Libya “targeting international organizations and foreign interests” were on the rise. An attack in June on the Benghazi mission blew a hole in a security wall, he indicated.

“Libyan security officials purport to have launched investigations,” Stevens wrote. One of those officials “shared his private opinion that the attacks were the work of extremists who are opposed to Western influence in Libya.”

“A number of local contacts agreed, noting that Islamic extremism appears to be on the rise in eastern Libya and that the Al-Qaeda flag has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities” approximately 100 miles east of Benghazi, the ambassador wrote.

In a cable dated Aug. 8, Stevens expressed concern that the “absence of significant deterrence” had “contributed to a security vacuum.”

As ABC News reported, a State Department email dated May 3, 2012, showed the department turned down a request from officials in Libya to retain a DC-3 airplane to help with security. Stevens was copied on the email.

A spokesman for the House Oversight Committee said the “State Department’s naive determination to follow rigid bureaucratic policies, instead of making common sense decisions that took the serious threat of terrorism conveyed by those on the ground into account, appears to have been a significant factor in the Benghazi Consulate’s lack of preparedness.”

As previously reported, leaked State Department emails dated Sept. 11, 2012, that were published this week show officials knew soon after the attack that Ansar al-Sharia, a Libyan terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda, had claimed responsibility for the assault on the consulate.

The emails found their way to as many as 400 U.S. national security, military, and diplomatic officials during the attack. The electronic missives were time-stamped in Eastern time and often bore the subheading SBU, which stands for “Sensitive But Unclassified.”

“The Regional Security Officer reports the diplomatic mission is under attack,” read the email. “Embassy Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well. Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four COM personnel are in the compound safe haven. The 17th of February militia is providing security support … The operations Center will provide updates as available.”

A second email stamped 4:54 p.m. contains “Update 1: U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi (SBU)” as a subject line. “Embassy Tripoli reports the firing at the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi has stopped and the compound has been cleared. A response team is on site attempting to locate COM personnel.”

“Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli,” it indicates.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely in the Age of Obama, America’s mainstream media has shown little interest in the atrocities in Libya as it focuses on silly distractions like what Mitt Romney really, secretly, truly, in his little capitalist heart made of coal, may have meant when he used the incomplete phrase “binders full of women” in the heat of an intense presidential debate.

Not much media attention has focused on the fact that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handpicked chairman of the Department of State’s investigation of the Benghazi atrocities is an apologist for Islamic terrorism who has a cozy relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

As Frontpage Magazine was first to report this week, the chairman, former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, participated in a panel discussion Tuesday night in Washington, D.C. on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness. The term is used the same way American leftists use the word “racist” to shut down debate.

Many of those few journalists who are following the Benghazi story are in full-on damage control mode in order to help their hero, President Obama, win reelection.

For example, confirmation bias-afflicted Mother Jones reporter Adam Serwer, long a reliably useful idiot in the service of Obama, argued yesterday that a single Middle East analyst’s newly discovered skepticism about one of the State Department emails sent during the attack invalidated all criticism of the administration’s handling of the Benghazi saga.

Because no record could be found on social media websites of al-Qaeda linked terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia claiming responsibility for the massacre, the group couldn’t possibly be tied to the attack, Serwer wrote in a piece containing the in-your-face headline, “GOP’s Benghazi Smoking Gun Goes Up in Smoke.”

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About Me

An award-winning investigative journalist, Matthew Vadum is senior editor at Capital Research Center. His work is cited by Fox News, Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and many other media outlets. He's been on "The O'Reilly Factor," "CBS Evening News," "The Daily Show," and "The Colbert Report," and denounced by Al Sharpton, Oliver Stone, Roseanne Barr, and Keith Olbermann. Michelle Malkin hailed Vadum for having "the foresight and insight to report on the [ACORN] story when nobody else would." Glenn Beck said he finally "got it" when Vadum appeared on his Fox TV show to talk about ACORN, helping him draw one of his famous tree diagrams. Vadum "writes some of the harder edged and more influential briefings" in the conservative movement (Washington Post) and is a “conservative data hound" (Washington Independent).
Vadum is also Adjunct Scholar at the James Madison Institute. His report galvanized opposition to liberals' campaign to force a kind of affirmative action onto private grant-makers in Florida. According to National Review, it convinced the Florida legislature in 2010 to pass SB0998 which outlawed the "ACORNization" of philanthropy in that state.